https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taXIbXYt6YY
The Israel Lobby with John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt | Outside the Box Podcast Apr 18, 2024

48:46 You just don't want to underestimate how effective the lobby is. I mean I have enormous respect for the lobby in the sense that these are remarkably smart and clever individuals who work overtime, who are relentless about pushing the United States in a pro-Israel direction and they are just really good at what they do, they have resources, they have smarts and on and on, so you just don't want to lose sight of the fact that this is a really formidable bunch of individuals and groups that understand how the American political system works and have been profoundly effective at influencing American policy towards the Middle East and in particular American policy toward Israel as anybody who's followed the Israel Lobby controversy over the last 18 years knows .

1:06:49 I would just add to that I think it's very important in a liberal democracy to make it work that you have institutions where you have particular groups of people who are free to speak truth to power, who are free to make controversial arguments and not be punished in a truly serious way. I believe that this is why freedom of the press is so important. You want to have a media that's filled with people who are free to criticize the government. This is not to say they won't make foolish or wrong-headed statements from time to time that may be true, but you want institutions that can critique the powers to be.

With regard to me and Steve we are tenured professors at elite universities. The reason that we have tenure is so that we are free to make critical comments about US foreign policy or US domestic policy without losing our job. So I believe that we have an ethical responsibility to make controversial arguments.

Of course we have to think that those controversial arguments are true and in the case of the lobby Steve and I believed what we said. We thought there was a huge amount of empirical evidence that supported our argument and we made it. We understood full well from the get-go that we were going to pay a certain price for this. That there was going to be an enormous amount of criticism of course until that wave of criticism hit us I don't think we fully appreciated how big the wave would be but nevertheless we knew that we would be attacked for writing the original article and then writing the book but we did it because I think we felt that we had a social responsibility as tenured professors to speak out on this issue in what I think was a level-headed way.

We thought there were important policy issues at play here that needed to be addressed and that people were ignoring or not talking about in large part because it was so controversial and they would get into so much trouble so we decided that we would write the article. I think that we did the right thing and I am proud of what I did.

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